An alumna of Clarion West Writer’s Workshop for science fiction and fantasy, I’ve written for markets like The New York Times and Time Out New York. Currently, I write about sci-fi for Blastr. I also edit the humor competition for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and here at Forbes.

The 10 Best Moments in Gaming in 2012

And if that wasn’t enough, David Braben (Elite) returned from releasing the Raspberry Pi to announce Elite: Dangerous on Kickstarter. As of December 17, the campaign is still running and just over of £750,000 out of a goal of £1,250,000. As you may know, Elite, the great-grandaddy of the genre, introduced the world to 3D space games, as well as the motif of the scrappy independent trader struggling to survive in an indifferent universe. Many have followed, but Braben co-founded this genre (along with Ian Bell), so for space gamers, his return is equivalent to Steve Jobs returning to Apple.

Ooo, and if you support with £35 or more, you get a downloadable copy of the sequel to Robert Holdstock’s “The Dark Wheel,” a novel that came with the original game.

I’ll admit, when I saw the rendering of a Cobra spacecraft in docking maneuvers, my heart leapt just a little: The last time I saw one of ships, it was a wireframe. (Yes, I’m being retro. When you’re old enough, you’ll be retro too.)

6. Source Filmmaker

Machinima, simply put, is a way to create your own movies using assets found in videogames. The Source Filmmaker (SFM) beats machinima up in the schoolyard and takes its lunch money.

According to a YouTube introduction of what SFM has to offer, virtual filmmakers “can animate, create posters, and make movies, all by repurposing the videogame world into a virtual movie studio.” By using the world of Team Fortress 2, users can “reshoot, reanimate, and re-edit it to make it [the footage] your own.” It’s powerful, it’s fun, it’s absolutely free. My only complaint: It’s PC only, so Mac users have to sit this one out.

Some game soundtracks are every bit as enchanting as music in the same space (such as classical or electronica). But until 2012, the Grammy Awards treated videogames as the red-headed stepchild of the music world. No longer. This year is the year that Journey was nominated for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media. (Sure, a song in Civilization 4 was nominated, but that track wasn’t originally composed for the game.)

In an email sent to me by composer Chance Thomas, “What many people don’t realize is how long we’ve been working towards this. Some of us started working on this back in the late 1990’s, as chronicled in Aaron Mark’s article for Gamasutra in 2000.”

Thomas gave credit to Diane Theriot and Leslie Ann Jones of NARAS for their work toward giving videogame soundtracks the legitimacy they deserve.

ArenaNet, makers of this year’s MMO success Guild Wars 2, decided that they didn’t want griefers in their game, ruining their players’ online gaming experience, because gamers would much rather fight dragons than trolls. So like many MMOs who want to keep their servers free from less-than-friendly smack talk, ArenaNet banned foul-mouthed gamers.

Unlike other MMOs, ArenaNet also called these out gamers on Reddit.

In ArenaNet’s reddit, “Suspensions for Offensive Names and Inappropriate Behavior,” many gamers asked the official support team exactly why they were banned. So the support team responded by (very publically) repeating the foul language that caused them to be banned in the first place.

As you can see from the over 5000 comments on this thread, much hilarity ensued.

3. Stealth ‘Em Ups win the year 2012

As Wikipedia will tell you, stealth has been an important element of gameplay since 1981, but it wasn’t until 2012 that stealth games became the new black: This is the year it became as popular to quietly take down an opponent from behind than it is to attack her face on.

Assassin’s Creed has been embracing this style of combat and shadowy ethos for years, but in 2012, Assassin’s Creed III has been only one of five entries in the stealth genre. Mark of the Ninja, Stealth Bastard Deluxe, Dishonored, and Hitman: Absolution also had a slice of sly pie. And after spending untold minutes in Hitman arranging for an enemy to electrocute himself on a fence, I can tell you that stealth ‘em ups are delicious.

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“but immensely satisfying, for space sim fans, is that the project raised $2.1 million, exceeding the projects goal of $500,000.”

Actually the project raised $6238536 during the RSI fundraising campaign (in the meantime they are over 7 Mio). And the initial goal was $2 Mio. Check their WS. Kickstarter was only a part of the fundraising campaign (and the smaller one).

Also ArenaNet called-out nobody. They were answering questions concerning bans on reddit. On a personal sidenote, I can only wonder how this irrelevant sidenote got on a list of the “10 Best Moment in Gaming in 2012″. But it’s not the only point on this list where this is the case. Opinions and perception can be quite different I guess…

The ArenaNet addition on the list is important because it gives us a perfect example that it is possible to manage a multi-million community with simple means like reddit-posts. So next time somebody tells us that an MMO-community is by its very definition a place of crap and jerks, you can point to Guild Wars 2 and say that they are wrong.

Any community can become a normal place of discussion and have a certain amount of civility if the moderators apply a certain number of simple rules, even if that community has millions of members.

That is why ArenaNet belongs there, and that is one of the reasons i play Guild Wars 2 today and not MoP.